Twilight Zone: The Movie

A feature adaptation of four episodes from the television series The Twilight Zone, with four directors taking a story each: John Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante and George Miller, plus a short prologue and a linking scene. The best known is Miller's closing segment, in which a passenger having a panic attack on a plane says there is something on the wing and nobody believes him. The film is remembered less for its cinema than for an accident. On 23 July 1982, during the shooting of Landis's segment, explosives struck the tail rotor of a helicopter. It came down and the actor Vic Morrow and two child actors, Myca Dinh Lee and Renee Shinn Chen, were killed. The trial that followed became a turning point in Hollywood. A grand jury returned involuntary manslaughter charges against several crew members including John Landis. The trial opened on 23 July 1986; the prosecutor called the defendants careless and negligent while the defence described the deaths as an unforeseeable accident. Testifying on 19 February 1987, Landis admitted breaking California child labour law by employing the two children after half past six in the evening. The jury deliberated for nine days and in 1987 acquitted all the defendants, on the ground that the prosecution had not proved the accident was foreseeable. Who it is for: viewers who like eighties fantasy anthologies and know the series. Who it is not for: anyone expecting the segments to be equal. The first sits under the shadow of the accident and the last is better than all the others.